3 Ways to Succeed In the Wild West of Regulations

As a majority of the provisional licenses are expiring and the cannabis market matures, the state has issued a notice to some of our customers stating that they should be prepared for inspections at anytime in the new year. To make sure that you are operating as compliantly as possible, take a look at these tips gathered from our METRC experts experience on the field.

1. Tag as Soon as You Receive Your Plants

The best way to get organized and stay on top of operation is to tag early. We recommend that as you move plants into your grow rooms, you tag them immediately. If you’re tagging and keeping METRC data by hand, this can be a taxing process, so we recommend the use of a scanner to keep track of all those numbers. If you’re using a 3rd party METRC reporting software, it could be integratabtle with an RFID scanner to even further reduce the labor involved in tagging. Why buy a scanner when you could just use your phone? With the cortex mobile app, use your phone’s camera to scan METRC tags into your system.

2. Weigh as You Harvest

In order to comply with the state regulations, every plant must weighed and its weight must be recorded individually. Some of our customers in the past have found this method taxing and longwinded. While they may be right, cutting down 30 plants, weighing them all as a bale, and averaging out the weight to each plant is a sure fire way to get yourself flagged for inspection. One of our previous associates who used this method (against our advice) was then subjugated to an inspection. The inspector looked at their average weight, asked them to grab a selection of plants from their drying room, and asked for each plant to be weighed. For each plant over the reported average, a check was made for an underreported plant to the government. For each plant under the reported average, an inquiry about a theft was made.

To avoid this and to make the recoding process easier, we suggest that you set up a weigh station outside of your drying room. With this in place, your plants can be weighed as they enter the room to record the wet weight, and as they exit the room to record the dry weight. To make the process even easier, the use of an integrated scale can eliminate the chance of any manual data entry error, just weigh the plant, and the values are automatically transmitted to our system. Just recently we’ve seen one of our customers innovate around one of our integrated scales, building a rolling frame around a hanging hook scale to individually weigh plants as they are chopped down! These values are then sent to our system, and the plants can be stored immediately into the drying room with no further process.

3. Keep Your Tags, then Dispose of Them Properly

Even after your plants have been harvested, make sure you keep those tags around! The state hasn’t issued a formal statement on how long to keep your METRC tags, but it is safe to say that you should keep them until the product have been moved from your facility. Keeping the tags around also helps in case you ever need to trace a plant back through the system. Once all of the product has been moved away, you’ll need to to dispose of the METRC tags by shredding them. This assures that none of your personal information, including your license number, can be taken away from the facility.

Using these few tips will help your cannabis operation function as smoothly and efficiently as possible while operating under the eye of the law.